Film Freak Central

Assassins/Cobra/The Specialist [Triple Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

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COBRA (1986)
*/**** Image C+ Sound C Extras D
starring Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, Reni Santoni, Andrew Robinson
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling
directed by George P. Cosmatos

THE SPECIALIST (1994)
*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Eric Roberts
screenplay by Alexandra Seros
directed by Luis Llosa

ASSASSINS (1995)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Julianne Moore, Anatoly Davydov
screenplay by Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski and Brian Helgeland
directed by Richard Donner

by Walter Chaw As easy as it is to dismiss Sylvester Stallone as your everyday, run-of-the-mill swinging dick, another in the pantheon of Eighties-into-Nineties box-office meatsticks assembled anew by Sly in his Expendables franchise, it becomes clear in retrospect that Stallone has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist in his most personal projects, if not always in his contract jobs. Although an obvious and atrocious failure whose Stallone-authored screenplay, the end-product of a series of rewrites Stallone took it upon himself to inflict on Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra manages still to deliver a few smart genre mash-up moments, a few topical reflections of late-'80s crime-wave paranoia. Sandwiched in there right between his second and third Rambo films and fourth and fifth Rockys, Cobra is the kind of vanity piece that appears now and again in Stallone's repertoire to distract attention away from all the other stuff that only looks like a vanity project. Stallone is sneaky in a very particular way. As a sociologist, intentional or not, he is absolutely brilliant, and just on the strength of his Rocky and Rambo pictures, he's managed as good a diary of the fears and hopes of the last twenty years as any other body of work from any other single artist. He's the Bruce Springsteen of popular cinema. Bruce produced a lot of crap, too.

True Detective (2014) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

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Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
"The Long Bright Dark," "Seeing Things," "The Locked Room," "Who Goes There," The Secret Fate of All Life," "Haunted Houses," "After You've Gone," "Form and Void"

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. On the original 2003 recording of The Handsome Family's "Far from Any Road," husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks intertwine their voices sinuously, trading the song's lonesome-death verses on equal footing. Her part pared down for the mesmeric opening credits of HBO's "True Detective", Rennie's whisper becomes a sudden intrusion, jarring both the lyrical and visual narrative. It's a hint of what's to come in the eight-episode series itself. When a woman character exerts an active pull upon the story of tormented Louisiana State Police detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), it's an interruption, a vitriolic hiccup. Prompted by Marty's stalking and volcanic abuse, his much younger mistress Lisa (Alexandra Daddario) reveals his serial infidelity to his wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan). To poison Marty for his adulteries, Maggie seduces a drunken Cohle. The two cops have no female peers, only suspects, victims, bereaved mothers, hookers, and strippers to be interrogated, rescued, or ignored.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, robutts
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw Early on in Transformers: Age of Extinction (hereafter Trans4), director Michael Bay seems to be equating the unjust hunt for our noble robot allies the Autobots with the Tea Party's persecution of immigrants, and then it goes to shit. It's a meaningless, impossible-to-follow trainwreck in the patented Michael Bay style that, also in the Michael Bay style, is deeply hateful of women and difference. What's new this time out is that the central object of violation for our lascivious appreciation is 17-year-old Tessa (19-year-old Nicola Peltz), who, upon introduction, is leered at by an assortment of older gentlemen before Bay whips out a (no-kidding) legal justification for our statutory interest. It reminds of the Tony Danza vehicle She's Out of Control not only in that its father figure, Cade YEAGER-because-it's-America-fuck-yeah (Mark Wahlberg), is over-interested in his daughter's budding sexuality, but also in that Trans4 is awful. Awful in its misogyny, sure, and awful because, in what has become a tradition in Bay's Transformers franchise, the only African-American character is comic relief...and a slave. Never mind. Oh, and it hates the infirm and misses no opportunity to mock their infirmity. Again, never mind.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Mike Kellin, Katherine Kamhi, Paul DeAngelo, Jonathan Tiersten
written and directed by Robert Hiltzik

by Bryant Frazer Ah, summer camp. Softball games, capture the flag, nightswimming, and life-changing boating accidents. Not to mention killer bees, child molesters, maniacs in the shower, and one kid with a whole lot of baggage, if you know what I mean. Sleepaway Camp is a slasher movie, and it depicts lakeside Camp Arawak as a pressure-cooker of hormones and teenage flop sweat. Into this fetid milieu step Ricky and Angela, teenaged cousins united by tragedy: a boating accident that killed Angela's parents and sibling some years earlier. Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) might be a little awkward, but he just wants to fit in; Angela (Felissa Rose), meanwhile, seems downright disturbed, spending much of her time dead silent, staring down her fellow campers with a mournful, almost accusatory glare. Before long, some of those campers start dropping dead as surely as the flies that coat the glue strips dangling in Arawak's kitchen. There's a soup incident, a shower incident, and an incident involving a toilet stall and angry bees. There's a bit of business with a curling iron that's probably inappropriate in a movie starring underage actors. The slasher's hands appear on screen, but do they belong to unhappy Angela? Overprotective Ricky? Or someone else entirely?

Jersey Boys (2014)

*/****
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda Clint Eastwood has never been the most self-referential filmmaker, preferring shopworn competence to flashy displays of idiosyncrasy. But it's hard to imagine he's not at least slightly gaming his audience throughout Jersey Boys, an otherwise limp tour through the Four Seasons' early discography. What else are we to make of the gag where baby-faced songwriter Bob Gaudio (Chris Klein dead ringer Erich Bergen) catches an image of his director's grizzled mug in "Rawhide" on a hotel TV? While that feels like a pretty straightforward joke on Eastwood's uncanny endurance all the way from "Sherry" (1962) to Jersey Boys the Broadway musical (2005), it's a bit harder to read an equally surreal moment like the dispute between producer and sometime lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and wise-guy guitarist Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) over the band's sound. "I'm hearing it in sky blue," Crewe whines in the middle of a recording session, "and you're giving me brown." On the one hand, it's not like Eastwood to take the piss out of his own work, but on the other, what better analogy for his adaptation process can there be than the conversion of a sky-blue all-American songbook to a shit-brown sung résumé, rendered all in blacks and greys save for the odd splash of salmon and the occasional scrap of tweed?

The Lego Movie (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Emmet is the platonic Everyman who becomes embroiled in adventure and intrigue after stumbling on a fabled MacGuffin called the Piece of Resistance. It's Hitchcock with a dash of Star Wars or The Matrix, or maybe vice-versa, as Emmet is designated "the Special" (a.k.a., the Chosen One), the saviour who will lead a band of rebel misfits to victory against the nefarious Lord Business. Oh, and Emmet's a little Lego dude with the voice of Chris Pratt. His predicament takes him on a globe-trotting journey through Legoland (not the theme park but a realm where Lego characters bloom to life à la Toy Story), not quite north by northwest but with a pit stop in the Wild West, where he picks up a wizardly black mentor named Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman--one wants to type "natch"). Lacking obvious talent and vision, Emmet is doubted and doubts himself but eventually rallies the troops and, when Lord Business finally unleashes his liquid freeze-ray known as the Kragle, voluntarily sacrifices himself for the greater good. It helps that he's desperate to impress the sultry, resourceful Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), who considers Emmet hopelessly uncool--especially compared to her boyfriend, Batman (Will Arnett).

Echoes

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955, d. Henry King):

Boyhood (2014, d. Richard Linklater):

Evilspeak (1982) - Blu-ray Disc

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**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Clint Howard, R.G. Armstrong, Joseph Cortese, Claude Earl Jones
screenplay by Joseph Garofalo and Eric Weston
directed by Eric Weston

by Bryant Frazer Consider the pig. Pork is damned near a gourmet food these days. Celebrity chefs will serve you layers of pork belly wrapped around potatoes, figs, even pineapple. They'll dip bacon in chocolate, infuse it in vodka, or drape it across an ice-cream sundae, resplendent in its brown glory. Your local organic market probably sells artisanal bacon cured with dark, fine-grained muscovado imported from Mauritius and flavoured with angel farts and faerie dust. The recent cinema has also celebrated the pig, via two excellent Babe movies and a decent adaptation of Charlotte's Web. It wasn't always that way, though. No less an authority than God Himself went Old Testament on pork back in the day, and it took the famous and completely disingenuous "Pork: The Other White Meat" campaign to rehabilitate swine for the U.S. market. What I mean to say is that the 1982 horror movie Evilspeak, in which a trio of crazed, Satan-possessed porkers burst into a bathroom and disembowel a nude woman taking a shower, couldn't have done the humble pig's reputation any favours.

True Blood: The Complete Sixth Season (2013) - Blu-ray with Digital Copy

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Image A- Sound A Extras B-
"Who Are You, Really?," "The Sun," "You're No Good," "At Last," "**** the Pain Away," "Don't You Feel Me," "In the Evening," "Dead Meat," "Life Matters," "Radioactive"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The penultimate season of "True Blood" was fraught with behind-the-scenes turmoil. Creator-showrunner Alan Ball had departed the series and his replacement, Ball's old "Cybill" cohort Mark Hudis, was himself replaced partway through the season by long-time "True Blood" scribe Brian Buckner. (Ball has a history of tapping out after five seasons and being notoriously difficult to replace--"Six Feet Under" ended when it did because he couldn't convince anyone to take over.) Whether this directly contributed to an abrupt plot development that effectively cleaves the season in two, the truth is that "True Blood" weathers these personnel changes invisibly enough as to affirm it is either on autopilot by now or, to be less generous, was already something of a runaway train that had only ornamental use for a conductor. Whatever the case, the show's sixth year represents a marginal rebound--though at this point in my "True Blood" journey, I'm just a masochist ranking the instruments of torture.

Non-Stop (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Anson Mount
screenplay by John W. Richardson & Chris Roach and Ryan Engle
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Furthering the all-signs-point-to-yes idea that the greatest threat to national security is an ill-informed white guy with a grudge of some kind, Jaume Collet-Serra's execrable Non-Stop is the latest stop on the Liam Neeson winsome-badass tour. In this one, he plays alcoholic air marshal Bill Marks, grieving the death of his daughter and about to get one last chance to make right with the universe. At this point, it's fair to ask if Neeson is exploiting the tragic loss of wife Natasha Richardson for added gravitas in shit like this or genuinely drawn to these roles from an insensate expression of pain. Whatever the case, as this is not much different in feel and quality from his soon-to-be-completed Taken trilogy, it might be time for him to find a different agent. Lucky for Bill, sharing the fateful flight essayed in the film is an adorable moppet he can pretend is a version of his daughter and save from death, as well as a middle-aged but exactly-attractive-enough woman, Jen (Julianne Moore), he can pretend is the mother of his dead kid and quasi fall in love with. It's all so gratifyingly tidy.

22 Jump Street (2014)

½*/****
starring Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Peter Stormare, Ice Cube
screenplay by Michael Bacall and Oren Uziel and Rodney Rothman
directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

by Walter Chaw The smart parts are unbelievably stupid and the stupid parts are unendurable, making 22 Jump Street, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's follow-up to their well-regarded The Lego Movie, one of those things like Shrek that should do pretty well. Itself a sequel to a reboot of a cult television show about twenty-something cops pretending to be teenagers, the film finds buddy-cop heroes Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) going undercover in college, the better to bust some drug dealer. They have a tough-talking superior in Capt. Dickson (Ice Cube), who, this time out, gets a glass office someone refers to as a "cube of ice." Get it? There's much acknowledgment that sequels are often terrible, inflated things deficient in new ideas and reliant on amplification, and it's delivered with this exhausted, arch air. At least that's how I read it. I didn't even crack a smile.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

***/****
starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the graphic novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
directed by Doug Liman

by Angelo Muredda Whatever one thinks of his weaselly insouciance as a performer, it's hard to argue against Tom Cruise's record of choosing solid collaborators to bring a certain kind of high-concept amuse-bouche to life. From Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, a derivative film about derivatives, to the more or less solid auteurist permutations of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the results have varied, but Cruise's reputation as the sort of star who can get moderately interesting pulp bankrolled and realized by moderately interesting talents has deservedly persisted. So we arrive at Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman's first kick at the Cruise can--a clever, fleetly-paced sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day with all the paradoxes of Duncan Jones's structurally similar Source Code but a more playful demeanour.

Breaking the Waves (1996) [The Criterion Collection] - Dual-Format Edition

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****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgård, Katrin Cartlidge, Udo Kier
screenplay by Lars von Trier and David Pirie & Peter Asmussen
directed by Lars von Trier

by Bryant Frazer Breaking the Waves can make you queasy from its opening moments, when director Lars von Trier's name appears with the title superimposed over it, the title card swaying gently on screen as if it were photographed at sea. The effect is less subtle on home video than it is on a big screen, where you're not as aware of the edges of the frame, but the message is the same: suddenly, you're adrift, unmoored, alone.

Like Someone in Love (2012) [The Criterion Collection] - Dual-Format Edition

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***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear enough that Like Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets back.